Thanks gmax for the advice. I do plan on putting this into a real database sometime soon. I thought that since it already was in a text file, I'd learn to DBI query it first as the transition to converting and querying a real database might be a bit too much to handle in one fell swoop.

I know I don't always put enough info in my questions. I try to be courteous and keep it short and simple.

thanks for the repliespeppivif time is money....is it safe to say it's five dollars past three hundred?

Well, in this case, that he chose those for his delimiters would lead me to believe that his data is what I might call 'vanilla' (no field contains a pipe or newline). Besides which, once he puts the data in to a RDBMS, thenhe doesn't have to worry about it.

Just out or curiosity, what do you consider good delimiters? I use '||' for field delimiters, and '@@\n" for row delimiters...